horrific compression artifacts out of After Effects

[Tom Chase]

This isn't a problem I am only having with RED footage but last night I had a great lighting show - so I pulled out the 5D MKII and shot some time-lapse. Took it into AE, rendered it out as a H.264 and uploaded it to youtube 1080p 15fps, and it looks blocky and ugly. I'd a done my first shoot on my Epic dark room single light over head - footage in Premiere looked good, uploaded it youtube via AME and same thing.

Here is the link to the time-lapse (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLUlReci9Kw) any one got any suggests to not get this blocky look when sending it up to youtube?

Thanks

Tommy

 

[BRANDON JAMESON]

https://support.google.com/youtube/troubleshooter/2888402?hl=en

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALRB4JeSbKo

 

[Tom Chase]

@brandon I saved it out as a H.264 with an mp4 wrapper. I only see these artifacts in dark footage.

Thanks for the links.

 

[Phil Holland]

Encoding is tricky business out of multiple applications. To trouble shoot you need to determine if your settings for AME reflect your After Effects comp. I'm suspecting your project is in 8 bits and should be in 16 or 32.

 

[Will Steer]

What bitrate was the h264 file? Have you tried experimenting with varying amounts of keyframes and multi-pass encodes?

Although youtube don't recommend it, I still think there is some value to uploading a less lossy codec like ProRes of DNxHD. You don't incur a generation loss in image quality than in the same way as encoding h264 > to low bitrate h264 which will cause artefacting, obviously darker areas have more noise which means the encoder has to work harder which again means more artefacts.

The bitrate of youtube is very low at full HD, maybe try vimeo to see if you have similar results?

 

[Tom Chase]

@Phil you know I didn't even think to check the bit depth in AE, thanks for that hint.
@Will I did do a vimeo upload and it looks a lot better than YouTube. I'm going to look into other codecs as well.

Thanks

Tommy

 

[Mike Harrington]

If you render out of AE using the render queue....you are not getting 2 pass encoding like you do inside PPRO or AME

To go from AE to h264 make sure to go through AME to get 2 pass encoding....this will improve results somewhat

As Will said youtube will also re-encode your footage... for ultimate quality you may want to render to an intermediate HQ codec.....either that or crank up our H264 settings well past their presets....like 20-30 mbps just to give youtube something better to work with

 

[Alexander Mejia]

Timelapse videos are the hardest to compress nicely and send to youtube, with all the moving on frame you'll usually have compression artifacts.

You can attempt to knock down details by using a noise reduction filter in After effects, as this can help. Just keep in mind you'll be losing detail.

Also I would export out of Adobe Media encoder with high bitrates. And for really short files you can export DNxHD or Cineform, or ProRes to maintain detail.